PayShepherd targeting manufacturers with platform to sort out contractor billing errors
by Sadi Muktadir
PayShepherd recently announced securing $3M USD in seed financing to scale up and hire more engineers as they attempt to expand across North America.
PayShepherd targeting contract manufacturers with platform to sort out billing errors
Wesley Sessenwein knows a thing or two about billing errors.
When he worked as a contractor, a $200,000 billing error almost cost him a client relationship that took years to build up. The instance of double-billing led to embarrassment and a loss in confidence from the client, all a result of relying on outdated systems and paper trails keeping track of labour spend and operational data.
This costly error made Wesley create PayShepherd, contractor billing software that measures real-time data to tell a manufacturer where it is overspending or incorrectly being billed. For many manufacturers still using outdated excel sheets or a smorgasbord of solutions, sifting through a contract’s details can be time-consuming and inefficient, the exact problem PayShepherd hopes to solve.
“Procurement departments do a great job in allowing businesses to be competitive when it comes to negotiating contracts. Problems arise when it’s time for the work to actually happen. The forty-page contract is on the desk of the people managing the facility. Even if facility managers had the forty-page contract in front of them, it’s difficult to sift through all the terms and conditions to make sure the service is being delivered correctly,” Wesley Sessenwein, CEO explains.
Wesley provides the example of overtime billing, and how terms may say it begins accruing only after 8 hours in a work day, but service providers may accidentally begin charging for overtime immediately long before the 8 hours has been reached.
“PayShepherd automates and digitizes the process across all the the vendor contracts, catching discrepancies and adjusting for anomalous billing for the manufacturer.”
When asked how PayShepherd’s software differentiates itself from many of the ERP or CMMS software available to manufacturers out there, Wesley was clear.
“ERPs and CMMS software take a 30,000-foot view on spending. They’re built for buying low-value high-volume items from a pre-populated catalog, things like widgets and cogs. High-value and low-volume spending with a lot of variables from a contract is a stronger fit for something like PayShepherd. Take for example, an annual boiler inspection at a heavy industrial facility. These are typically executed on an hourly basis, which would historically result in massive amounts of paper billing. PayShepherd digitizes this billing process and uses the contract intelligence automation to identify over billing in real time, reducing the likelihood of relationship damaging disputes down the road.”
Currently, PayShepherd is already found across heavy industries, including pulp and paper, power generation, mining and shipbuilding, and are looking to help manufacturing transition to further cost savings in a market that’s being pressed by inflation and supply chain troubles.
PayShepherd recently announced securing $3M USD in seed financing and Wesley was asked about how they planned to spend that money. Wesley mentions wanting to expand and hire out their engineering team so they could improve their products capabilities.
“Our main goal is to make it easier for manufacturing facilities and services providers to do business together. The administrative component of billing should be the least concern for them.”
